Gawker boss Nick Denton may want to rethink the sweeping redesign he unleashed on his Gawker Media empire earlier this month — as traffic appears to be plunging at most of the nine company sites since the radical changes were made.
In fact, the redesign is choking off traffic on all but two of Gawker Media’s sites, according to statistics compiled by Signature9.com, an online lifestyle research firm.
“Denton’s idiotic redesign is utterly killing his sites,” said one industry critic. “I wonder when he admits he was an idiot and banishes the redesign to the eternal fires of fail?”
Other industry sources were a little easier on Denton, giving him some benefit of the doubt.
These folks suspect at least some of the problems may be attributable to software glitches. Only a few days after the redesign was unveiled to a generally poor reception, an event occurred that seemed to prove the new layout was working and that Denton was right.
On Feb. 9, Gawker broke a story that showed a shirtless Rep. Chris Lee (R-NY) in a photo that he sent to a woman he met via Craigslist. Hours after the story hit, Lee, married with children, quickly became an ex-Congressman by resigning.
Denton felt vindicated.
But now it looks like even that avalanche of publicity hasn’t driven the numbers up.
US traffic for Gawker.com dropped from 2.4 million visitors on Jan. 17, before the change, to 1.6 million on Feb. 14, according to Signature9.
Denton said the change was sparked by his desire to make the site more amenable to video, both for viewing and, more important, for advertising, since the price of blog ads has been dropping across the industry. The old layout featured a long column of posts or blogs in reverse-chronological order.
The new design, unveiled on Feb. 7, centers on a main feature with a sidebar of secondary stories. At Gawker, the redesign was tweaked before the first day ended.
Still, the new format was more of a newspaper style, designed to keep the scoop of the moment at the top of the page.
One big objection is that it makes it much harder to follow comments in the new layout, critics have said.
“As a whole, there’s no way to know if the dropoff in traffic is a result of a mass exodus of commenters or a mass drop in pages included in Google. . .” writes Ym Ousley in the signature9.com story.
Another source attributed some of the falloff to a software problem that is making it harder to track the page views.
Denton ackowledged in an e-mail that page views are “a mess” right now. “We had 15.9m page views yesterday. So bouncing back after a dip last week.”
The new strategy also sheds new light on the departure late last year of Gawker Media’s top ad sales person, Chris Batty, who was vice president of sales and marketing. He spent seven years working with Denton, which in human years is probably like 49 years.
“The redesign is probably one manifestation of their estrangement,” said one source familiar with Batty and Denton.
At the time, Denton wrote, “Chris and I diverge seriously over strategy.” He also said that Batty was off to start a new venture, in which Denton planned on becoming an investor.
But nearly three months later, Batty has yet to resurface.
“He thinks he’s building a TV network, but it’s really just a low-cost CPM-blog site,” said a Denton critic. In the ad business, CPM is shorthand for the cost per thousand readers or viewers.
Conason exit
There’s been another change at the tempest-tossed Observer, which just installed ex-Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers as its fourth editor in the two years that Jared Kushner has owned the salmon-colored weekly.
Joe Conason, an 18-year veteran of the paper, has called it quits.
In one sign of the upheaval, he didn’t resign to the editor-in-chief or the president, Christopher Barnes, or to Kushner, but to Una LaMarche, the managing editor.
“I’m writing to let you know that as of today I am ending my relationship with the New York Observer,” wrote Conason in the farewell. “After more than 18 years and various changes in regime, that connection has be come attenuated, to say the least. Please tell Jared Kushner, Christopher Barnes, Elizabeth Spiers and anyone else who may need to know.”
Conason was a classic long-form investigative journalist, and the push seems to be for shorter stories and more Web reporting.
Spiers did manage to lure back Azi Paybarah, who had quit last May. He’ll be covering politics. kkelly@nypost.com